For example, in vehicles such as automobiles, air bag apparatuses are widely used to restrain an occupant by a bag that is deployed and inflated by deployment gas injected when a collision or a sign of the collision is detected.
In recent years, as one type of such an air bag apparatus, there has been proposed an air belt apparatus in which a bag is provided in a part of a seatbelt for higher occupant restraint performance.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-282164 describes an air belt apparatus in which a bag is provided in a shoulder belt for restraining an occupant from the shoulder to the breast and an inflator is provided at a buckle attached to a side of a surface of a seat in a three-point seatbelt for an automobile.
During a non-use state such as a normal use state of the vehicle (a state prior to deployment and inflation), the bag is stored in a folded state in mesh webbing or the like. However, a portion that stores the bag is thicker and less bendable than the other portions of the webbing of the shoulder belt. Hence, it is difficult for that portion to pass through an anchor where the shoulder belt is folded back.
For this reason, the bag is required to be stored while being folded short in a longitudinal direction of the seatbelt so that the bag can be located closer to a tongue than the anchor even when the seatbelt is not used.
In contrast, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-282164, as illustrated in FIG. 8 thereof, the bag is folded short by folding a portion of the bag remote from the inflator inward.